Guitar Hero My Hero!

International Association of School Librarianship, Paper presented at the School Library Association of Queensland and the International Association of School Librarianship Conference incorporating the International Forum on Research in School Librarianship (Brisbane, QLD, Australia, Sep 27-Oct 1, 2010)

"Guitar Hero" is a video game where one or more players use a specially made game-style guitar to play along to popular and well-known songs. Players need to match the correct notes and timings of the sings. An on-screen guide shows players which notes to play, when. There are levels of difficulty in the game, as well as the choices to play with or against other players. Players can select from bass, rhythm or lead guitar and the program adjusts the difficulty of play accordingly. In February 2009, the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development's Collaborative Research and Learning Program called for schools interested in trialling gaming for learning via a $4000 grant: $2000 for software and hardware, and $2000 for CRT release time. After the authors' Principal's endorsement, she applied for the program. The timeline was tight and there was no time to propose involvement in the trial to other teachers. So the decision was made for her to trial the use of the "Nintendo DS" and the "My Word Coach" program for a small literacy class of five students for a period of eight weeks. This trial was very successful and saw increases in attendance, punctuality, attitude and achievement. The success of the program and the concept of using video games for learning were introduced as a real and important way to address learning engagement in my school, Preston Girls' Secondary College. After this successful trial with Year 8 and 9, the author introduced the idea of using gaming at the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) level (alternative Year 12) to teacher Les Kyle as a possible way of approaching the literacy and numeracy aspects of the course in a totally different manner. By using a program such as "Guitar Hero: World Tour", they knew that students would be learning while enjoying themselves. As they know, that's when they best learn. So rather than trying to teach dry literacy and numeracy tasks with students often 18 years of age, they decided that the use of the video game and extended responses using social networking and other Web 2.0 tools would be ideal for this audience.